Defrag

Dear AG,

Thank you for posting your question on our forum.

It is possible that your drive cannot be fully defragmented because it is starting to wear out. Could you please specify what kind of hard drive (SSD or HDD) do you have?

You can try to clean out temporary files from the drive using a third-party utility and repeat defragmentation once again. If you have Auslogics BoostSpeed installed, you can use the My Scanner => Disk Space section of the program to clear up the junk files (available in free version). Please let us know how it worked for you.

Thank you in advance for your answer. We look forward to hearing from you!

The drive is a three year old HDD, and is not "wearing out". All temp files and old restore points, etc, are cleaned out before attemping to defrag, but the results will not improve beyond 13 percent...ever.

This appears to have started when I resized the partition on this drive, adding additional space to it from another partition using Acronis Disk Director. That process completed sucessfully, but afterward the drive showed 14 percent defragmented, and as noted, will not now improve. Proir to that it could be regularly defragmented to zero. A second drive on the computer, plus all partitions other that the Win 7 operating system partition, all behave normally. This is also a dual boot system, and running MS optimize/defrag from Win 10 for the Win 7 partition, then not in use, of course, also runs for up to twelve hours with virtually no improvement.

Dear AG,

Thank you for your reply.

Could you please specify the size of the files that were not defragmented?

We also recommend defragmenting the files with optimization, if you haven’t tried it before (see the screenshot).

Please let us know if it helped. Thank you!

Vera,

I ran defrag with optimization (again), which ran for two and one-half hours, then appeared to quit at about 75% complete. An analysis afterwards, does not match the screen shown during that process, which showed most of the disk defragmented. It also left the disk again at 14% fragmented. See below:

I ran a report, but it does not tell me the size of the files that are fragmented. The report says "OK" next to pages of files, but then closes with the File Defragmentation Summary, below:

Result - Description

OK - file successfully defragmented

unmovable file - file in use, access denied

cancelled - file defragmentation cancelled

free space not found - unable to find free contiguous disk space

unable to defragment - unable to defragment, defragmentation error

As I have a dual boot system, should I try running the program to this Win 7 disk when not in use and booted into Win 10? Will that make the "file in use" then available for defragmentation?

Of the 200 GIG partition, 125 GIG is utilized, and 14% fragmented, so I suppose this means 17.5 GIG are fragmented.

Any other thoughts?

AG

I did try booting in Win 10 and running the defrag from that system for the Win 7 partition (again), but that made no difference. Results the same, and the defragmentation remains at 14%.

Unless some solution is available to this issue, I suppose I will just live with it, the performance of the system remaining satisfactory. I would like to understand what is going on and address it however.

Thank you for your reply, AG.

The most likely reasons for Disk Defrag leaving some of the files unprocessed are:

1. There is a file on your drive that cannot be accessed even at Windows startup.

2. File that should be defragmented at system startup is too big and has fragmented free space so much, that there is no part on the drive big enough to contain it.

Please note that during boot-time defragmentation the algorithms are working on finding locations with free space, but not on consolidating it.

You can check if the big files are to blame by temporarily transferring them to an external drive and defragmenting the system once more. If this way defragmentation will be completed, the reason is found.

These recommendations should help you resolve the issue. If you continue having problems, please let us know, we will be happy to assist.